Wine lovers are often faced with a dilemma when it comes to choosing the best wine glasses for bringing the best out of their wines. Ideally the perfect glass could be used for all types of wine. But unfortunately, it doesn’t exist! That’s why the crystal and glassware manufacturers have such wide ranges! Even if the universal glass can’t be found, we can still choose a glass that allows the aromas of the majority of wines to best express themselves. Here are a few factors to take into account.

The diversity of wine glasses

When looking around a wine accessory or wine glass shop, the first observation is usually that the choice is very or even too vast! The glassmakers produce different styles of glass that are each best suited to a different style of wine, whether it be from France or another wine-producing country.

Some have ranges that cover different grape varietals, because a pinot gris from Alsace, for example, doesn’t have the same aromatic characteristics as a marsanne from the Côtes du Rhône. But these glasses don’t cover the depth of the different wines, notably those that are blended as is the case in Bordeaux, the Côtes du Rhône or the Languedoc-Roussillon.

To bridge this gap you can find glasses that are best suited to a particular region such as Burgundy or the Médoc. But you can imagine the number of different shaped glasses that exist, just for the different wine growing regions in France, let alone the rest of the world!

You can then even find glasses that claim to be better for Premier or Grand Cru wines, or for differing ages of wines. So perhaps the perfect glass does exist for a particular wine, but you’d have to have a very wide collection if you like different styles of wine.

And what if you don’t have the space in your wine glass cupboard?

So how to choose the glass that is best adapted to the majority of wine that you will serve? The glass plays an essential role when tasting wines in diffusing the aromas. Aromas are made up of molecules that are more or less volatile, that are released into the air, travelling from the glass to the nose. The more that the glass allows the aromas to evaporate, the more you will smell them, that is unless they are diffused too widely before reaching the nose.

You therefore need to have a glass where the diameter of the base is wide enough to allow evaporation to take place, but with an opening that is a little smaller than the base. This will help channel the aromas in the direction of your nose. Tulip shaped glasses are good for this.

Of course, not all aromas have the same volatility, so depending on the type of wine being served, you might want to help some aromas become more volatile by oxygenating the wine and using a glass with a wide base and large opening. For others that are more delicate of already fairly volatile, you might want to have a narrower base and an even smaller opening, or else you risk not detecting any aromas at all with the nose. By testing different ratios between the diameter of the base and the opening, you should be able to find an acceptable compromise for most of the wines that you serve.

By concentrating on the two or three styles of wine that you serve the most frequently, you can define the types of aroma that they most often contain: heavy aromas such as wood and spices, or lighter aromas such as fruit and flowers, and the need for oxygenating the wine, and so the shape of the glass best suited.

Then you just need to choose the maker and the price range before opening the next bottle, and savouring the taste... in moderation of course!